Gail Jordan is a revolutionary disguised
as a bespectacled black woman in her 30s, pretty enough,
but unprepossessing in a crowd.

But here's where the guerrilla tactics
come in.

Yesterday, the Toronto Star
reported on a hidden crisis of single mothers, mostly
black, mostly in public housing and routinely living
with fear and violence. We asked everybody we
interviewed to offer solutions.

Jordan's advice was as blunt as it gets:
The problem lies as much with the women themselves as
with men who turn out to be absent dads.

"Single moms need to get together as a
sisterhood and help one another, not bring each other
down," she says. "They need to stop trying to steal each
other's men and being hurtful to other women. They need
to stop seeing other women as the enemy."

Jordan, a single mother of four boys at
Sparroway public housing, at Leslie St. and Finch Ave.
E., knows her comments go against popular culture, which
teaches girls to compete for boys from a young age,
finding identity in how they measure up. Ultimately,
they revel in the triumph of a boyfriend stolen or
another woman trounced.

These are trappings of bondage, insists
Jordan.

At first, she offered different advice.
At Sparroway with several other single mothers, she
talked about the need for more educational programs in
low-income housing. But with thought, she came to
realize the main issues are "a lack of a sense of
self-esteem and responsibility, anger and apathy, which
has been passed down unfortunately from generation to
generation."

And these issues must be dealt with
first, by both men and women.

"The cycle of pain and despair has to be
broken ... and I believe that personal responsibility is
part of it. People need to stand up and say enough is
enough," says Jordan. "It's time to focus on the big
picture. Our children are our future. The community
programs are there as a support system, however, it's
not up to the community at large to raise our children.
It's up to us."

In that light, here is a sampling of
other ideas to tackle the problem:

Absent dads must get involved in
parenting

Jordan is tough on women, but equally
tough on men. She had no help from her "baby father,"
and her own father stopped talking to her because she
was a teen mom. She says "men need to lose their `macho'
attitudes of `breeding,' or being proud of having five,
six or 10 kids out there. Are these children being taken
care of? If not, why are they proud of scattering their
seed everywhere? I find it unattractive, personally."

She adds: "Men need to get it in their
heads that being a father means being there for their
children and showing their children the importance of
fatherhood. It doesn't mean getting a woman pregnant and
leaving her to raise the child alone."

Jordan says women must encourage their
boyfriends to take care of their children, even the ones
they don't have together.

Women should think about birth
control

Whatever the method, women agree they
should take control of their own bodies with birth
control and also ensure girls are educated. But Jordan
says it's not always so easy. When she asked for a tubal
ligation after the birth of her fourth two years ago,
she says the doctor refused, telling her to talk it over
with the father. It was the man's first child with her
and, according to Jordan, the doctor said men usually
want another child.

However, the women we interviewed
stressed they love their kids and don't regret having
them.

Make fathers take financial
responsibility

A key problem is that couples often
haven't married and women haven't sought paternity
tests, or taken results to court to seek support. It
leaves them strapped. Some women continue to make
excuses for fathers who check out. Said one: "Men don't
like it when women are overbearing and they tend to give
up responsibility for their kids."

Too bad, says Doreth Brown, telling
women to get tough and break the cycle. "I was too proud
to go to court when my first child was born to fight for
money and I regret that now."

Women should demand respect

Natashia Fearon, a 21-year-old student
and poet, says women must stop being victimized and
insist men treat them properly. For instance, she
believes words like "baby father" and "baby mother" are
"gangster words, and I don't like that. I tell my
friends that I only want to hear words that I can
understand and see in the dictionary. ... I take no joy
in hearing it, and I see it as nothing but ignorant."

Take back your own lives

This advice from several people applies
to both sexes. It argues there's a good reason the
absent-dad syndrome is a multi-generation problem.
According to Pentecostal Pastor Al Bowen, from
Etobicoke's Abundant Life Assembly, "the whole tradition
of fatherless families came from slavery." He calls the
import of Africans as slaves a "travesty" and
single-parent families, "slavery's curse." Men, he says,
were used to father children and then forbidden from
raising them. "That's how the black single-parent family
developed."

Fearon says slavery was "part of our
culture and our race and men had no choice in leaving
their children ... but some people still live in those
times. We still allow ourselves to be enslaved by old
patterns of living, such as fathers being separated from
their children."

Phase out public housing

This may seem an out-of-the-box
solution, but many insist living in public housing
strips men and women of pride. "Your mentality comes
from where you live," says Bowen, "and we compel these
families to live in rat-hole conditions and we don't
offer rent-to-own, or other solutions." If she had her
way, Fearon would tear it all down tomorrow and start
again with mixed housing throughout the city and
rent-to-own plans. "(Public housing) gives you nothing
to feel good about, nothing to take pride in. To start
bringing pride back to fathers, abolish public housing
and let them work on homes of their own," she says.

Mothers, if Dad's not around, be
your own role model

Fearon, who studies graphic design at
George Brown College, hopes she's a role model to her
nieces. Her sister, at university in Australia, and a
cousin at the University of Toronto, also set positive
examples. Show what you can do, she says, and children
will heed.

During interviews at Sparroway, children
– and especially girls – hung on their mother's words.
Cheyenne, 13, was glued to her mother, Michelle Smith,
and Jaylin, 11, listened intently when her mom, Natasha
Downey, said she hopes she's a role model for her
children.

It's too soon to know for sure, but
Jaylin's response when asked about her future was a good
sign. At 11, she already has a plan to be a pediatrician.